The moral of his story: Movies can teach

By ELAINE WILNER

Can amoral Hollywood really provide moral instruction to those of us
sitting in the dark? Robert Cort C’68,G’70,WG’74,
the producer of 52 films, including “Three Men and a Baby” and
the soon-to-be-released “Against the Ropes” starring Meg
Ryan, not only thinks so, he’s written a novel, titled “Action” (Random
House, 2003), that proves it.

“We who make movies have a role and a responsibility,” he explained
in a telephone interview. “Today, we are in a fallow creative period.
We are not making movies that provide emotional substance.”

Cort will expand on those ideas and talk about his book in a lecture, “Movies:
America’s Secular Religion,” that is part of the Penn Humanities
Forum’s year-long investigation of belief on Tuesday, October 28
(see “What’s On”).

A tale with a Hollywood ending

In his novel, Cort deftly wraps 50 years of film history around a fictional
family that always seems to be in the right place at the right time.
It’s a roman a clef without the clef—almost everyone is real,
from Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor to Steve McQueen and superagent Mike
Ovitz.

Cort never sugarcoats the mostly egregious behavior of his characters
or downplays the Machiavellian politics, but at the same time he adheres
to all the old moral imperatives: power always has its price, the bad
guys get their just desserts and in the last chapter, the hero finally
hits his first hole-in-one. Now that’s a Hollywood ending.

To tell the truth, use fiction

Cort started out to write a non-fiction history and had spent a year
and a half doing research before switching to fiction. “I was a
history major at Penn,” Cort explained, “trained by Lee Benson
[professor emeritus]. But I’ve spent my whole career in the world
of storytelling and I realized that the only way to convey the emotional
life of people—to tell readers what is going on in the hearts and
guts of the people I’ve worked with—was in fiction.”

Cort realized that a fictional device—three generations of the
Jastrow family, described as minor Hollywood royalty—would provide
the broad canvas he needed to trace changes over half a century. “Besides,” Cort
added, “how many people want to read a history of Hollywood? I’m
a whore for an audience—and you can write that down.

“I don’t think I played fast and loose with anybody’s reputation,” Cort
claims. But critics have pointed out that some of his most unsavory characters
are long-since dead or, like Michael Ovitz, out of power.

The real insider’s guide

“Action” could be called “Project Greenlight” for
the literarati, a behind-the-scenes look at how Hollywood works from a real
insider. “I really wrote it for two audiences,” Cort said, “for
those intrigued by Hollywood, because we wield enormous influence, but
also to let people know what a producer does, what a director does, what
an agent does.”

Cort came to Hollywood in 1975 as a management consultant. A year later
he went to work for David Begelman, a former agent and later president
of Columbia Pictures, whose role in a check-forging scandal was chronicled
in David McClintick’s best-selling 1982 book “Indecent Exposure.” “That
was the best non-fiction representation of Hollywood I ever read,” said
Cort. Of course, Begelman has a big role in “Action” too.

The fact that “Action” has not yet appeared on the best-seller
lists doesn’t faze Cort. “I am thrilled that it was taken
seriously,” he said. “The only people who didn’t like
it were film historians. It got better reviews than any of the movies
I’ve made.” The New York Times called it “a sprawling
book that manages to be both entertaining and smart.” Peter Lefcourt
in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “The serendipity of success and
failure, the ecology of power, the intangibility of talent are elements
not just in the book’s themes but in its brushstrokes. Cort has
the wardrobes, the restaurants, the golf courses, the argot of the business
down pat.”

Penn Current Express

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